Mickey’s ‘Best Wife Ever:’ Actor’s Eighth Bride Has Proved to Be Mrs. Right
By Tim Clodfelter, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C.
Mar. 6–After seven previous tries, actor Mickey Rooney says he has finally gotten marriage right.
“I married much too young, I didn’t even know what a relationship meant,” Rooney said. “You can’t just fool with caring and sharing and being married, it’s a lifelong institution. And it’s the greatest thing in the world.”
Rooney’s eighth wife, Jan, attributes the success of their marriage to “separate bathrooms and lots of patience. You have to have patience with this whirlwind. He goes a hundred miles an hour, and he’s got a hundred deals a day. He’s something else, that one.”
Rooney’s first marriage, to Ava Gardner in 1942, lasted just over a year. Six subsequent marriages never made it to double-digit anniversaries. But Mickey and Jan Rooney have been together for 30 years, longer than all of Mickey’s previous marriages put together.
“We’ve had our troubles, everybody does,” Rooney said. “That’s just human nature. But love conquers all.”
This is Jan’s second marriage, the first having been when she was 18.
Mickey is 87; Jan declined to give her age, joking that she’s “old enough to know better” and that she “hasn’t seen 50 in a little while.”
They met in the 1970s. “It was at my agent’s house,” Rooney recalled. “I was playing piano and I knew the minute I met Jan that she was a lady.”
She, however, was wary, based on Rooney’s penchant for short-lived marriages.
“She didn’t want to go out with me, because of my track record, you might call it,” he said. “I don’t blame her for that. But I was persistent.”
Eventually, he won her over and they married in 1978.
Jan recalled a compliment from Mickey’s longtime friend, singer/actress Ginger Rogers. “She said, ‘Jan will be your best wife ever, and the last.’”
Mickey and Jan Rooney will be appearing together Saturday in Greensboro as part of the Carolina Theatre’s celebration of its 80th anniversary — an anniversary his show-business career predates by more than five years.
Born Joe Yule Jr., he first took to the stage at the tender age of 15 months as part of his parents’ Vaudeville routine. From 1926 to 1933, he starred as Mickey McGuire in a series of comedy shorts based on the Toonerville Trolley comic strip and adopted the stage name “Mickey Rooney.”
His fame grew in the 1930s and ’40s, when he played Andy Hardy in a series of teen comedies and also appeared in such films as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Boys Town and National Velvet. He hasn’t slowed down much since then, continuing to appear in films — 350 and counting, he says — as well as on television and stage.
He has at least three films due out this year, one of which — Harmony Ranch, in which he and his wife play a couple who run a family ranch in the 1950s — was filmed last summer in Winston-Salem.
The two have also performed on the stage in England, in a production of Cinderella, and frequently take their two-person stage production Let’s Put on a Show on the road. Their stage work even earned them a shared star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
In Let’s Put on a Show, Jan sings Patsy Cline and classic standards; Mickey recounts anecdotes from his long show-business career and shows film clips; and they perform duets together.
“I want to know what he’s putting in his Metamucil,” Jan said. “He sings up a storm, plays a little piano, and we do duets together.
“He’s full of hope and inspiration to young people and seniors alike. If he’s still out there kicking up his heels at the age of 87, why can’t we?”
Mickey said he enjoys performing with Jan on stage and in movies.
“She’s my wife and she’s clever,” he said. “I love working with her…. She’s a wraparound talented lady. She’s a painter, we paint together and we write songs together. We’re a couple. We care. And you know, you can have love, but you also have to be friends.”
— Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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The Show
Mickey and Jan Rooney will appear in Let’s Put on a Show at 8 p.m. Saturday as part of the 80th anniversary celebration for the Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene St. in Greensboro.
Tickets are $25-40, plus a $1.50 restoration fee.
Tickets are on sale now through the Carolina Theatre Box Office at 333-2605 or at www.carolinatheatre.com.
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